VoteStream: Data-Wrangling of Election Results Data

If you've read some of the ongoing thread about our VoteStream effort, it's been a lot about data and standards. Today is more of the same, but first with a nod that the software development is going fine, as well. We've come up with a preliminary data model, gotten real results data from Ramsey County, Minnesota, and developed most of the key features in the VoteStream prototype, using the TrustTheVote Project's Election Results Reporting Platform.
I'll have plenty to say about the data-wrangling as we move through several different counties' data. But today I want to focus on a key structuring principle that works both for data and for the work that real local election officials (LEOS) do, before an election, during election night, and thereafter.

Put simply, the basic structuring principle is that the election definition comes first, and the election results come later and refer to the election definition. This principle matches the work that LEOs do, using their election management system to define each contest in an upcoming election, define each candidate, and do on. The result of that work is a data set that both serves as an election definition, and also provides the context for the election by defining the jurisdiction in which the election will be held. The jurisdiction is typically a set of electoral districts (e.g. a congressional district, or a city council seat), and a county divided into precincts, each of which votes on a specific set of contests in the election.

Our shorthand term for this dataset is JEDI (jurisdiction election data interchange), which is all the data about an election that an independent system would need to know. Most current voting system products have an Election Management System (EMS) product that can produce a JEDI in a proprietary format, for use in reporting, or ballot counting devices. Several states and localities have already adopted the VIP standard for publishing a similar set of information.

We've adopted the VIP format as the standard that that we'll be using on the TrustTheVote Project. And we're developing a few modest extensions to it, that are needed to represent a full JEDI that meets the needs of VoteStream, or really any system that consumes and displays election results. All extensions are optional and backwards compatible, and we'll be submitting them as suggestions, when we think we got a full set. So far, it's pretty basic: the inclusion of geographic data that describes a precinct's boundaries; a use of existing meta-data to note whether a district is a federal, state, or local district.

So far, this is working well, and we expect to be able to construct a VIP-standard JEDI for each county in our VoteStream project, based on the extant source data that we have. The next step, which may be a bit more hairy, is a similar standard for election results with the detailed information that we want to present via VoteStream.

-- EJS

PS: If you want to look at a small artificial JEDI, it's right here: Arden County, a fictional county that has just 3 precincts, about a dozen districts, and Nov/2012 election. It's short enough that you can page through it and get a feel for what kinds of data are required.